Lynda McCallum

Lynda grew up on her family’s sheep and cattle property in a little district called Timor, in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales. The youngest of five children, Lynda began pony club around the age of three and often spent days mustering on the lead behind her late father.

She met her husband Jim in her early 20’s and they purchased their first cutting trained mare “Tassamint” together in 2005. Both Jim and Lynda were successful on her, in the camp draft arena and this laid the foundation for what they would create together for the future, now known as ‘MacCallum Performance’.

They have two teenage children, Peter and Olivia. While the kids were babies, close friends Tom and Jane Williamson encouraged Lynda to have a go at training her own horses for the Snaffle Bit Futurity. She first competed in cutting at the 2009 Snaffle Bit Futurity. This was the start of Lynda’s non-pro career in the cutting pen.

Lynda has gone on to train horses for the non-pro aged events ever since and has had several milestone achievements such as Reserve Open Futurity Champion on ‘Metallic Storm’ in 2018, Non-Pro Classic Challenge Champion, and several Open and Non-Pro aged event championships at smaller futurity shows. Lynda has represented Australia twice in the USA as a member of the non-pro team and was inducted into the Non-Pro hall of fame in 2019. Lynda and Jim sell horses through the premier performance horse sale each year, the ‘Nutrien Classic sale’. They love the unique nature of the Australian Performance Horse Industry and strive to breed and train horses that suit a number of disciplines from cutting to camp drafting and cow horse.

Lynda credits the many professional and non-professional trainers who have assisted her and shared their knowledge along the way, and she believes the secret to training and showing great horses is to never stop learning and integrating training techniques and mindset strategies into the MacCallum Performance program.

Second to their kids, the horses Lynda and Jim have produced are Lynda’s greatest achievement.

The family now makes Woolbrook, NSW home where they run a cattle property and raise the next generation of Australian performance horses.